The naming of emotion is a crucial stage of emotional development. Experts in the field of psychology indicate that an ability to name emotions and manage emotional experiences prepares an individual for the development of empathic social skills as well as cause and effect thinking. For instance, a child who “feels like hitting” has one outlet of expression in mind. In contrast, a child who “feels mad” can choose more than one response to his or her emotional experience.
Developmental experts describe specific stages of emotional development and/or healing, moving from the experience of physical sensation into the experience of emotion and gradual discrimination of specific emotional experiences. Regions of the brain are stimulated during emotional experience, but identification is made when an individual recognizes body and feeling sensations. Because of this physical feeling experience, it is important that individuals identify specific emotions through a combination of visual, kinesthetic, and linguistic means.
The naming of emotion is important throughout all of life and all areas of life. The ability to name emotion is thus important in a variety of environments. Particularly with respect to children, some of these environments include early childhood learning centers, child assessment and screening centers, environments serving as a complement to parenting education and social skill building curricula, at Head Start centers, hospitals, elementary schools, foster care environments. Helping children to name emotion is helpful and important to parents, teachers, foster care providers, and adoption workers.
Current educational and retail market toys frequently address the identification of emotion through recognition of facial expression, but unfortunately do not adequately address translation of emotion naming into physically felt experience. There also is a lack of toys available to provide a symbolic, kinesthetic approach to learning or to address the naming of emotion as a developmental stage. A variety of toys dealing with emotional experience, however, are commercially available. Western Psychological Services, Creative Therapy Store, offers a variety of toys that concern emotional experience. The Spring 2000 catalog from Thinking Publications (a distributor of products intended to enhance communication skills) offers only one emotion poster and one written book about feelings. Free Spirit Publishing offers the book “Hands are not for Hitting” by psychologist Martine Agassis. Lakeshore Learning Materials offers some posters and a game called “Feelings and Faces” that shows pictures of children with facial expressions representing emotion.
Notwithstanding these commercial sources of toys that relate to the emotional experience, there is still a great need for tools that help integrate and represent emotional experience. There is also still a great need for tools that address the naming stage in the development of emotional experience and that provide a visual, kinesthetic, and linguistic interaction.